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Phrase units as determinants of visual processing in music reading
Author(s) -
SLOBODA JOHN A.
Publication year - 1977
Publication title -
british journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.536
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8295
pISSN - 0007-1269
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8295.1977.tb01566.x
Subject(s) - phrase , span (engineering) , point (geometry) , psychology , reading (process) , analogy , cognition , phrase structure rules , communication , linguistics , cognitive psychology , natural language processing , computer science , artificial intelligence , mathematics , geometry , philosophy , civil engineering , neuroscience , engineering , generative grammar
Keyboard musicians sight‐read passages of music in which the amount of information about the presence of phrase units was systematically varied. A distinction was made between ‘physical’ unit markers, which allowed delineation of a unit prior to analysis of its component elements, and ‘structural’ unit markers, which defined a unit in terms of the sequential rules obeyed by its constituent elements. During the execution of the passages the text would be removed at a point known in advance only to the experimenter. Subjects were then required to execute all the material seen beyond this point to provide a measure of the eye‐hand span at that point. It was found that the presence of structural markers increased span, and tended to cause span to extend exactly to a phrase boundary. The presence of physical markers did not increase span, although it also tended to cause span to extend exactly to a phrase boundary. The results suggest a clear analogy between the cognition of music and language, in that knowledge of abstract structure is of importance in the organization of immediate visual processing of text.